twitter search is completely broken and mastodon search never worked, so everything i post is pretty much lost in the ether
@tmcw If someone was to spider Mastodon instance, cache, and dial in a search--what would some possible ways to make money to sustain it? Ads? What else?
@nelson Good to know. I have no intention in building one, I just would like to be able to find my people and be found by my people. I think people also have a lot of pre-conceived notions about search that also shut down discussion. I never mentioned crawling, cross-instances, unsolicited scraping, or public anything--just asking how could you deliver a sustainable search. Guess I am foolish.
@kin Mastodon mainline already has ElasticSearch for server search. Opt-in both for the server and (I think) each user. But it's not a federated search.
Folks have tried to build cross-instance search many times and are shouted down every time. I think it's foolish.